


built to last

by triangularium



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Angst, Anxiety, Character Study, Fluff, Idiots in Love, Introspection, M/M, Miscommunication
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-20
Updated: 2017-03-20
Packaged: 2018-10-08 05:51:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10379886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/triangularium/pseuds/triangularium
Summary: Winning second place at the GPF, getting engaged to his long-time crush Viktor Nikiforov, moving to St. Petersburg… Yuuri Katsuki should be living his dream life -- or he is until his anxiety rises up to cripple him.A.K.A. Yuuri’s greatest enemy has only ever been himself and Viktor tries to make things better in his unique, dorky way.





	

“I am further away than ever, / I am closer than ever before.”  


\-- “Locked Out” (Susan Minot)

During the first night that Yuuri spends in St. Petersburg ( _in Viktor’s apartment! his fanboy dream come true_ ), he wakes up well before sunrise. It takes him a few minutes to reorient himself, staring at the unfamiliar ceiling and trying to forget the sensation of falling. The roof is spray-painted a light blue that reminds him of Hasetsu sea surf on a sunny day, and of his nightmare -- a small dinghy in the middle of a tempestuous ocean, tossed mercilessly by greybeards that rose up suddenly in stormy walls under a lightning-torn sky.

He turns to the side slowly under the shared blankets, struggling to remain quiet and not tug on the covers so much that he wakes Viktor up. His fiance’s hair shines in the gloom, a ray of moonlight shafting through the gaps in the blinds and haloing his head in an ethereal glow.

 _Angel_ , Yuuri thinks, and a furious blush creeps onto his cheeks though nobody has heard the thought and Viktor isn’t awake to tease him for it. He reaches out to touch him, to run his hands through the silvery locks that he knows will fall through his fingers as silkily as water. Then, he thinks better of it, stopping halfway and retracting his hand.

Suddenly, it’s difficult to breathe, all of the events of the past few days rising up from his heart and leaching its way into and up his throat to choke him. The whirlwind of activity that had greeted him in Japan after the Grand Prix Final, the interviews that had blurred together into a haze of questions and microphones, packing his paltry belongings into boxes and suitcases, and Viktor on one knee at the banquet, egged on by a laughing Chris who’d helped him plan how to propose ‘properly.’

His fiance.

Fiance.

He repeats the word mentally until it loses all of its meaning. The swelling worry threatens to burst out of the composed dam that he stores it behind in a strange sobbing fit, and he wants to laugh hysterically, disbelievingly.

His neck cracks slightly as he feels blindly along the nightstand for glasses that he shoves onto his face ( _4:00 AM in bright red LED_ ) and his phone. Before he knows it, he’s typed in the password ( _122588_ ) and the blank default search engine page lies before him, the cursor blinking. Silent. Waiting.

Somewhat masochistically, Yuuri finds himself searching for his old program videos on Youtube. After all, if he’s not going to go back to sleep, it’s best if he puts this time to use by analyzing his old moves and coming up with fresh choreography for the new season.

He winces when he watches his Lohengrin routine, his senior debut to Two Steps from Hell’s “Nero,” last year’s exhibition to Mogwai’s “Take Me Somewhere Nice.” His eyes, sharpened by the sting of Viktor’s well-intentioned but often overly blunt advice, pick out flaws -- a botched landing of a quad toe loop here, the sloppiness of a particular step sequence there. By the time he’s eaten his way backwards through all of the commentary up to his junior days, he begins to wonder what Japan, Viktor, Minami -- what anyone has ever seen in him. Viktor says that it isn’t so much that his body becomes the music but rather that the music becomes him, a symbiotic flow, beautiful and ever-evolving and free as the wind. He squints, trying to grasp at the potential his coach once saw worth traveling half a world to train, but all he sees are mistakes, messes, half-baked regrets, and a strong desire to somehow go back in time and edit every fall and haphazard movement to an artificial perfection.

There’s a recommended video in the corner, and he doesn’t recognize the thumbnail until two seconds after he’s clicked on it. He hasn’t seen it before, not really -- his recreation of Stammi Vicino, the siren’s call that ensnared the Living Legend of Russia.

It’s grainy and low-resolution, and as he watches himself flit across the screen in small, deft movements, momentarily unweighted by the chains of anxiety, he feels somewhat empty, magicless.

_Do I really look like that when I’m skating?_

If he really does, the forlorn, broken expression playing across his features, the longing, the loneliness, there’s little wonder that Viktor doesn’t look away from him when he’s on the ice. There’s something entrancing about this pain, chipped, sharp and tangible, the suffering of a caged bird leaping into the air -- 2, 3, 4 revolutions -- before inevitably being tugged back by the unforgiving ground. The overlaid music from Viktor’s FS continues at minimum volume, tinkling in the early morning silence as he scrolls down, his fluttering chest stiffening and solidifying to a solid lead.

He wishes he didn’t.

 **salchow-king** ( _2 weeks ago_ ): well… that was anticlimactic. viktor i really hope the sex was worth giving up 1 whole season (5 likes)

 **maddienikiforov** ( _5 months ago_ ): ew i just wasted 5 minutes i’ll never get back (12 likes)

 **physicsphan99** ( _7 months ago_ ): he really did let himself go after the grand prix… (3 likes)

 **kuristina** ( _7 months ago_ ): 6th place & it shows (240 likes)

 **strictlyConfidential** ( _6 months ago_ ): hahaha faaat (34 likes)

 **chocolate-ballerina-girl** ( _6 months ago_ ): what do u expect from a diet of katsudon? (32 likes)

 **plisetsky-fangirl** ( _1 week ago_ ): my yuri kitty showed this pig who’s better @ gpf barcelona (256 likes)

 **viktoria5** ( _1 week ago_ ): can u imagine wat would’ve happened if vikki coached yura? he probs would’ve broken both short & fs world records! (201 likes)

Yuuri climbs out of bed, feet padding softly on the linoleum as he makes his way to the kitchen, opens the fridge, and removes the box of leftovers from last night’s Chinese takeout. He digs into the noodles, cold spicy sauce sticking to the roof of his mouth in chunks, the tines of the fork pricking his inner cheek before salt explodes on his tongue. He isn’t hungry, and he thinks he will never be full.

His initial reaction is a righteous anger. What do they know, after all, about figure skating? Most of what fans see are the edited versions, chopped and airbrushed and fine-tuned until the masks are airtight, with the exception of especially emotional events like The Kiss that they then create backstories for because they aren’t privy to what’s behind the curtain. The dirt, the grime, the depression, the reality. The pressure to perform, because under the spotlight, you aren’t just Yuuri Katsuki or Viktor Nikiforov. You’re Japan, you’re Russia, and when you win gold and your country’s flag drifts upward, you smile with the pride of a thousand thousand, the conduit of dreams. When you lose, you cry not for yourself but creaking under the weight of millions of lost expectations, and if you aren’t careful, you’ll break before you’ll bend. Yuuri bends, curving in on himself after competitions in which he’s lost the podium, and hiding in empty bathroom cubicles, trying and failing to become one with the toilet.

This fury doesn’t last for long before fading into a deep, profound melancholy. Ever since “The Lilac Fairy” and the fleeting vision of Viktor’s face tilted, twirling towards the heavens, Yuuri’s math notebooks have been riddled with random doodles of the contours of his silhouette and practice signatures of “Yuuri Nikiforov.” These are among the few secrets he will guard religiously from Viktor, who has crept into the empty spaces in his life relatively insidiously in spite of his full-frontal, generally extra approach. Yuuri knows, realistically, that he has a low level of natural talent or the body for skating. His experience doing so has been a continuous graph of plateaus and sudden slopes upward as he struggled through single jumps, combination spins, quads. Even now, he can land just three reliably in competition in contrast to Viktor’s refined five. Nothing has ever been enough and he’s clawed his way to the top (or close to it) with sheer determination and honing the ability to outlast his pain.

Stamina.

Another secret: Yuuri sprained his ankle and gouged a deep scar into his left thigh one night in Detroit when he was practicing the quad flip without Celestino’s permission a month before a GPF qualifier. He needed seven stitches and skated his way to a bronze at Skate America before flubbing Trophee de France in fifth.

His leg aches, twinging in remembrance. He looks down to find only empty cardboard and a sinking heaviness in his stomach, and for a moment, he is horrified. The stab of panic mellows to self-loathing, the constant radio of static negativity playing in his mind with its volume turned up.

_I ate all of it? But I didn’t even notice… I’m worthless, such a pig, a pig, a pig…_

Unshed tears turning the world into an undefined slush, he swallows and pulls on a thin jacket before rushing outside. Ice hits his cheeks, melting almost immediately. 

It’s snowing.

Normally, this would remind him of Makkachin, who is currently snuggling under Viktor’s right arm, and memories of him frolicking in the nearby park, but the guilt, an invisible black slime coating his insides, drives him to start running. He doesn’t know how long he runs, but before long, he finds himself on the bridge. His face and fingers are numb and he’s shivering and nauseous. If he narrows his eyes, he thinks he can see shadows through the sleet -- Yurio and Viktor in the distance.

_My whole life, I’ve been trying to catch up to you._

Yuuri can’t take it anymore. He slows to a stop, leaning into the barrier, his forearms resting on the steely, grounding metal.

He throws up.

Swiping the back of his hand across his sour-tasting mouth, he muses, _How weak_.

 

The next day is the start of training. Yuuri’s entered a new circle of hell.

Somehow, he made it back to Viktor’s flat without getting lost in the endless alleys of St. Petersburg, and skipped breakfast with a false grin and a pretty lie about oatmeal he’d picked up from a convenience store on the way back. 

_Yes, Viktor, I’m keeping with my diet. I’m fine, I’m fine, I’mfine._

For someone who’s spent his whole life lying to the cameras, Yuuri thought Viktor would know more about detecting when someone was doing the same. Maybe he wanted to be noticed and stopped, to realize that someone cared enough to dig through the veneer to the raw truth underneath. It isn’t fair to judge Viktor like this, to hold him up to unreasonable standards, because for all that Viktor Nikiforov is Victor Nikiforov, he is still only human. But Yuuri is probably even less than that and spends the whole morning stewing in his misery. Viktor is his usual chirpy self, and even one-word replies don’t faze him.

“Look, Yuuri! I just posted another picture of Makkachin!”

“Yuuri, I was thinking about our routines for the next season -- what do you think about pairing our themes?”

“Yu-u-ri!”

“I think we need more milk. Can you believe I’ve never had to get groceries more than once in two weeks before?”

They drive to the rink in an icy quiet, the weight of unsaid words hanging in air thick enough to cut with a knife. Viktor frowns as Yuuri removes his skate guards and slides onto the ice, opens his mouth to say something, but closes it almost immediately. He’s been troubled all morning since he woke to the absence of warmth on his left, the indentation in the pillow where Yuuri should have been but wasn’t. Something isn’t right, but there are still boundaries between them that Viktor is afraid to cross. This is different from Hasetsu, where lingering touches and teasing questions about past lovers meant nothing. Lust, not love.

He loves Yuuri and he needs to trust him to open up in his own time, and then meet him where he is. But sometimes Yuuri needs a push in the right direction, and Viktor is walking on eggshells around him, so, so afraid that his pushes will be rough and shatter his love’s heart. He hasn’t forgotten the Cup of China.

Yuuri traces figure eights on the ice, the tips of his dark hair blue in the lukewarm Russian sunbeams. _Such beauty_ , Viktor wonders with the awe of a person discovering a new dimension, _deserves laughter and goodness, not tears_.

Of course, Yuuri hears none of this. Alone near the windows, he rotates in place mulishly, his limbs sluggish and the lower half of his body in a constant state of pain. He feels like a large bruise, and for once, he wants to take a page out of Viktor’s book and sink to the ground with a dramatic wail.

After his compulsory figures, Viktor skates over and the ice _shnicks_ under his golden blades.

“Why don’t you train your quad flip?” he suggests. “I was thinking about including more of those in your future programs.”

He is formal and oddly stiff and Yuuri is irrationally offended by the thought that he’s acting so unapproachable that even Viktor is avoiding him. He glides off with an angry grace, and lands four, one after the other, on the opposite side of the rink. When he looks back, Viktor is studying him contemplatively, but his gaze flicks aside as Yurio storms in, dropping his bags on a bench with an almighty crash and approaching with the purposeful vengeance of an angsty teenager.

“Oi. Katsudon. Old man,” he acknowledges, before he launches into a flawless quad lutz. Yuuri watches, envious, before transitioning into another flip. This is his ( _and Viktor’s_ ). This is a jump that Yurio can’t do. He’ll teach Viktor to glance away from him when he’s skating ( _don’t take your eyes off of me_ ).

It takes underrotating three triple axels in a row and collapsing in dizzying heaps before Viktor shouts at him to take a break. In the lobby, Yurio brushes past him, bony shoulder colliding with his upper arm in his version of a friendly nudge as Yuuri presses the button for the energy bar in a vending machine.

“Katsudon,” he snarls aggressively, all bark and no bite, “get better or I’m going to get gold at Worlds and you and the geezer will never get married.”

Yuuri doesn’t reply. He shoves the bar, wrapper crinkling, into his athletics bag, a lump building up in his throat again.

 

The afternoon is a mix of bumps and uncharacteristic flubs and new broken blood vessels under his skin that will bleed a mottled purple overnight. The Russian team’s juniors and novices have likely been disillusioned about the skills of the GPF silver medalist. Yuuri is back to square one.

“Yuuri,” Viktor starts tentatively as he opens the door to his apartment, “something’s been bothering you. You only skate like that when you’re distracted.”

A pause.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Viktor’s eyes are blue and open and warm, and it’s so hard for Yuuri to stay strong and closed-off and standoffish when they make him want to be weak. 

_Truly, Viktor is my katsudon._

Viktor’s lips curve upward ever-so-slightly, but it’s a sad smile. Yuuri’s fingers twitch. He wants to smooth away the wrinkles, erase the sadness and heartache and distance. He is also afraid. Viktor has walked in on him naked in the onsen, but somehow, this seems more intimate than that. If Viktor sees this, the ugly, hacking sobs, the self-flagellation, the glittering shards of glass that Yuuri has been split into, will he still want him?

_After everything, I’m scared of rejection._

He wants to say this out loud:

“Viktor, I love you so much, but I don’t believe I’ll be able to keep you. Nobody believes I can, so how can I? After all, you’re… you, still so far away. A dream I’ve been sprinting toward my whole life. A dream I needed to prove myself to, but every time I see you land a quad, you skate farther, elusive. I have so much ground to make up to finally be your equal, and so little time to do it. I have three good seasons left, maybe less. After, when I can’t make music with my body, will you -- I’ll grow fat and ugly. I drool in my sleep and I have bad morning breath. You’re timeless, twenty-seven and beautiful. One day, you’ll be eighty and still beautiful. And I’ll be staring into a mirror, too weak to reach out to hold you.”

Of course, Viktor hears none of this. They slump inside, lonely in their separate dejections. Yuuri presses his lips together tightly and takes a step into the vast unknown.

He powers on his phone as Viktor putters about the kitchen for a healthy after-practice snack. The page is still open, and Yuuri is immediately assaulted by several extremely rude comments about his weight. He slinks up behind Viktor, hesitating due to both apprehension and to indulge by gazing at the play of shoulder muscles under Viktor’s thin shirt as he washes the dishes.

By now, he’s probably noticed the distinct lack of a certain takeout box from the refrigerator, but he hasn’t mentioned it.

Yuuri presses the side of his face into the curve of Viktor’s neck shyly, embarrassed and oddly guilty all over again. He doesn’t say anything. No words are necessary. One day, he will know that Viktor forgives him unconditionally.

Yuuri stares as he reads, lips mouthing the words unconsciously before they stop moving completely, only the flicker of his eyelids signaling the progression of his attention.

Viktor puts the phone down on a dry spot on the counter and turns around to face Yuuri, lifting his chin up. Humiliatingly, Yuuri finds his eyes growing wet once more.

_This is it. This is the time he finally leaves --_

“You know, Yuuri, I got a lot of hate mail when I first began growing my hair out,” he says conversationally. “The first Russian Fairy, although we should probably never talk about it in front of Yurio. There were women who were convinced I was attempting to mimic something unnatural and even more men who thought I wasn’t a masculine role model. I mean, it was bad enough that I was a figure skater, but to blend the lines between the genders -- that was the point of no return.”

He picks up a napkin and wipes away the drying tracks on Yuuri’s cheeks with such gentleness that Yuuri thinks he is going to cry again.

“One man told me that I’d turned his son into a faggot.” The last word is sharp and harsh in his mouth, juxtaposed with the accent-softened tones of the other ones. “Once, I walked into a bar only to have several large men feel me up. They called me a cunt and a whore and a bitch and said that I should spread my legs for them because no self-respecting woman would want me anyway.”

Yuuri gasps and wraps his arms around Viktor, self-pity vanishing abruptly in favor of an angry protectiveness. Viktor rests his chin atop Yuuri’s head and hugs back. After a few minutes, he extricates himself but replaces the space with a careless one-armed clasp almost immediately. He holds the phone out towards Yuuri, a white rectangular glow in the twilight, and then Yuuri _sees_.

 **YUURIfan77** ( _5 weeks ago_ ): my katsudoooon my lil cutie’s grown upppp (1260 likes)

 **shimmerysequins** ( _3 months ago_ ): u can tell he’s done ballet every move is so graceful (320 likes)

 **victuuri-ftw** ( _3 months ago_ ): exactly, rite! i wish i could skate like that but it looks like i should just aim to qualify for the u.s. championships first :( so jelly (6 likes)

 **guitarbasics^^** ( _7 months ago_ ): to every one of you haters saying that viktor shouldn’t be coaching a ‘loser’ i beg to fucking differ. yes, we all know yuuri flubs some jumps in competitions, but there’s a reason his pcs is so high! i only hope vikki’s coaching manages to raise his confidence to the point @ which he believes what the rest of us see -- that he’s amazing & he deserves what he has. yuuri -- if you ever read this, don’t give up! skate for yourself & not anyone else :) (2564 likes)

 **ledoucheCode** ( _3 days ago_ ): if this poem gets to 100 likes i can die happy  
yuuri katsuki  
smol sinammon roll  
yuuri katsuki  
pork katsudon bowl  
yuuri, oh eros, our senpai, just please  
oh wtf how do u look cute when u sneeze? (142 likes)

 **sparklymakka** ( _2 days ago_ ): viktor & yuuri are relationship goalsss (534 likes)

 **born-to-ship-victuuri** ( _4 months ago_ ): me & my roommate are singing the lyrics to stammi vicino @ the top of our lungs in the middle of the night & our neighbors just threatened to call the police on us for public disturbance but YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE lololol ;) (128 likes)

 **katsuki-fan98** ( _3 hours ago_ ): dis pork cutlet fatale has come so far *gross sobbing commences* i look forward to seeing him give viktor, plisetsky, & chris-chan a run for their money next season :* (78 likes)

 **v-nikiforov** ( _now_ ): You don’t have to keep reaching for the stars alone anymore, moya zvezda. You’re already there.

 

That night, Yuuri dreams of a small dinghy in the middle of a tempestuous ocean, tossed mercilessly by greybeards that rise up suddenly in stormy walls under a lightning-torn sky. He twists himself into the blankets, burrowing towards safety. Then, through the mist -- a green light, steady, regular, calm. The clouds clear.

He looks up, fingers outstretched. The gold ring glints softly, reflective.

The stars wink back at him.

**Author's Note:**

> moya zvezda - my star
> 
> Disclaimer: A lot of Yuuri's anxiety is based off of my own. He's an extremely relatable character, somewhere in the middle of the spectrum between Yukiteru Amano ( _Mirai Nikki_ ) and Kirei Kotomine ( _Fate Stay Night_ / _Fate Zero_ ) in terms of emotional expression. To me, the teary scenes between Viktor and him are the deepest ones because they always symbolize another barrier falling down as they move closer to one another (your hands, your legs, / my hands, my legs, / and our heartbeats / are fusing together).
> 
> Viktor and Yuuri give me hope that I'll find love too one day. The quiet kind of love that you know without having to speak of it, the kind when you watch your significant other flipping pancakes one Sunday morning, humming badly to some song only they can hear and sashaying about the kitchen and - _oh_.


End file.
